SOURCE: Healy, Margaret. “Pericles and the Pox.” In Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings, edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, pp. 92-107. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Healy asserts that in Pericles Shakespeare presented a veiled criticism of the efforts of King James I to wed his children to members of the Spanish royal family.

Louis MacNeice's poem Autolycus (1944-7) gives aptly magical expression to the dominant apprehension of Shakespeare's late plays in our century. Autolycus evokes a picture of the Bard at the sunset of his career mysteriously moving away from the ‘taut plots and complex characters’ of the major tragedies, conjuring instead ‘tapestried romances … / With rainbow names and handfuls of sea-spray’, and from them turning out ‘happy Ever-afters’ (ll. 3-6). MacNeice's words capture a certain ambivalence towards this Shakespearean sea change: indeed, the romances, with their emphasis on the production of wonder...